Word: method
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...buzzing in a stone jug," wrote George Bernard Shaw in 1894. It was Casals' destiny to change all that, and he began early. At that time, student cellists were taught to bow with their arms close to their sides, even holding a book under their armpits as a method of instruction. Casals tried bowing more freely and also began experimenting with the fingering of the left hand, which in the old tradition used to zip up and down the finger board like a yoyo. The changes may seem trivial, but these techniques revolutionized both the playing of the cello...
...work for schools which produce ethical children who believe in themselves--children who will make history rather than be content in merely reading history," his campaign literature promises. He will work for education which liberates rather than domesticates. For this to happen, "there must be a change in both method and content of Cambridge education," the literature warns. "changes in method alone--such as the 'open classroom'--are insufficient. 'Innovative' and 'individualized' racism is still racism...
Ferreri follows a straightforward method: He begins with decadence, then pushes it to its extreme. His timing is exact, always cutting away from a scene once depravity is well established, never carrying on for the sake of prurience. Followed properly, this method would shock, never titillate, but the double standards of soft-core pornography weaken The Grande Bouffe. The simulated sex becomes funny in otherwise serious scenes. The film leads from abuse of food to abuse of bodies, but the bodies are less real than the food, so the progression falls flat. A similar problem occurs in suggesting Michel Piccoli...
Mean Streets discards this method. When Scorsese builds up the pressure there's no release: there are no orgasms to let off the steam, and the violence lashes out like a lizard's tongue--it never changes anything, and the high tension prays relentlessly on an audience. The bursts of voltage are supplied by the setting: a needle in an arm, a siren, a scream, a Fat City sequence of a man waking alone ringing with hangover and dreams burning off fast, shrill urban music--devices like these make up for hours of narrative padding or careful ambience-building...
...scientific method itself, which is just common sense and experimentation, is a denial of the failed, big-scale tragedies of farm, factory and forum which now threaten to bury us in their rubble. And, it seems to me, this same common sense approach now demands that we look to small victories in small places, to creative community, to neighborliness, as the way to our most grand victory--the return to human scale, human purpose, and human, rather than institutional, values...